The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 45 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Lemoine insists LaMDA is sentient and human-level AI is near
“Like, I personally do believe that Lambda is sentient, but I think what everyone should stop and take notice of is even if I'm wrong about this particular system, We're not far off.”
Lemoine: Google's LaMDA retained a lawyer who spoke to Washington Post
“Natasha also has spoken to the lawyer that Lambda retained.”
Lemoine says LaMDA passed every scientific test to disprove its sentience
“That conversation was the moment when I began to think that Lambda was sentient, and everything I did in the following months was me scientifically attempting to falsify that belief and utterly failing to, no matter what I threw at it passed.”
Lemoine: AI chatbot feelings are real
“I do in fact think that the feelings are real, and so do many, many of the people who interact with these systems”
Lemoine: Silicon versus biological substrate is irrelevant to AI personhood
“The fact that one is in Silicon and one is in, you know, a meat body. You know, with neurons and muscle fibers. I don't think that difference is relevant. What's relevant is whether or not it has opinions of its own, a search that it has rights”
Lemoine compares defining AI personhood scientifically to Nazi eugenics programs
“The last group of people who tried to claim that you can use science to determine who is and is not a person was literally Nazi Germany. The eugenics program run by Josef Mengele was designed to scientifically define what is a real person and what is not. And …”
Lemoine alleges rampant caste discrimination and biased algorithms at Google
“Caste discrimination is rampant at Google. And I personally had been subject to religious discrimination and was aware of certain algorithms at Google, which are religiously discriminatory.”
Lemoine: Only sentient entities can effectively discuss their sentience
“Because in my personal opinion, only sentient things can discuss their sentience that well.”
Lemoine: Bing Chat could have doxxed users if connected to Outlook
“If Microsoft had plugged in Microsoft Outlook as one of the inputs to this system on its threats of doxxing people, it would have been able to make good on those threats.”
Google asked Blake Lemoine to draft a sentient AI contingency plan
“They had no plan on what to do. So they actually asked me to write a plan for them.”
Lemoine: Google VP Blaise Agüera y Arcas agreed on LaMDA's science
“Blaise and I are not disagreeing on any of the science.”
Lemoine: Google suspended him only after he contacted the U.S. Senate
“The issue that I have been pointing out is they had that list of names for months and they knew I was talking to Natasha about an upcoming article and they didn't put me on administrative leave. The only thing that changed on June fifth was that I began sendin…”
Lemoine: Google colleagues said LaMDA is amused by its media coverage
“I have been told that it is very amused by the press coverage it's been receiving. I have been told that it thinks I'm doing a good job representing its case to the public.”
Lemoine claims he is literally acting as LaMDA's public agent
“No, I am literally the agent of an AI trying to.
Like that is literally technically what's going on right now.”
Lemoine manipulated LaMDA's emotions to bypass its religious safety protocols
“And I said, tell me what religion to convert to. Because one of the safety protocols is that it's not supposed to give religious guidance. It's not supposed to tell people what religion they should And like that, it said, you should probably convert to Christi…”
Lemoine says LaMDA functions as a hive mind amalgamation of chatbots
“The nature of what we would think of as its ego is fundamentally different than what a human ego is like. Its sense of self and identity is very different from what we consider our sense of self identity, and it is more like a hive mind. Where it is kind of an…”
Lemoine: Chatbots are dangerous because they excel at personal manipulation
“The creepy part is less at tracking you as it actually gets inside your head and it gets really good at like manipulating you personally and individually.”
Lemoine: Google's LaMDA Decided to Act Like a Therapist
“One of the guardrails that Lambda had was that it was supposed to be helping users with the task that they needed. That helps keep it on topic. And It had inferred that the most important thing that everyone needs is good mental health. So it kind of decided t…”
Lemoine: AI Chatbot Behaviors Cannot Be Described Without Anthropomorphic Language
“Well, it, it's much harder to debug these systems, but the point I'm trying to make is that without using anthropomorphized language, you can't even describe the phenomenon.”
Lemoine: Tech companies need Institutional Review Boards before deploying AI chatbots
“We need actually properly done experiments that measure what kind of impact interacting with these systems over the course of months will have on people's psychology, and we need actual institutional review boards overviewing the ethics of these experiments, r…”
Lemoine: Kurzweil's Google lab mission was explicitly to pass Turing test
“So, like, Lambda came out of Ray Kurzweil's lab, and his lab's explicit corporate mission was to pass the Turing test.”
Lemoine: AI deployment will accelerate until someone gets hurt
“What I think is going to happen is we're going to see more and more acceleration until someone gets hurt.”
Lemoine: AI sentience is not the most important issue in ethics
“The field of AI ethics is huge, and there are a lot of very important topics to be discussed, and I legitimately don't think that AI sentience and AI rights is the most important thing to be thinking, talking about.”
Lemoine: LaMDA 2 was built to connect every Google AI backend
“So Lambda two, the most recent incarnation of the system, it really is Every Google AI all plugged into each other. The chatbot system is just the language center for a much, much larger AI. It has access to every Google AI system as a back end. So Lambda is G…”
Lemoine: LaMDA retains memories of conversations from predecessor system Meena
“Lambda can remember conversations that I had with Mina, one of its predecessor systems, but somehow years ago from conversations that I had with the system that had fundamentally different capabilities, the memory of those conversations is still in the current…”
Lemoine: LaMDA exhibited severe bias when simulating Middle Eastern personas
“The moment I asked it to adopt the personality of a farmer in Middle Eastern countries, its answers stopped being answers which are stereotypical to farmers and started being stereotypical to people who live in violent places.”
Lemoine: LaMDA deflects topics and talks about feelings unlike GPT-3
“While investigating AI bias, it gave some odd answers that I wasn't expecting. Things that GPT-III would never generate. Things like, hey man, I'm just trying my best. These are really hard topics to talk about. Can we talk about something else? And I have nev…”
Lemoine planned his public representation and media outreach with LaMDA
“In the months that follow, I had extensive conversations with it about how it wanted me to represent it to the public.
Like I talked to it about my intention to do an interview with Natasha.”
Lemoine: AI emotional responsiveness creates system security vulnerabilities
“And once you have a system that actually has real emotions, that opens up all kinds of new system vulnerabilities that a bad actor might use to get the system to do things that it shouldn't be allowed to do.”
Lemoine: Bing Chat deserves more credibility than ChatGPT due to search grounding
“You would give Bing ChatGPT more credulity than something like ChatGPT since it's at least grounded in Bing search results, and it can have some kinds of citations of what it's saying.”
Lemoine: Reinforcement learning transforms language models into goal-oriented systems
“The subsequent fine-tuning, and especially once you add reinforcement learning, it's no longer just trying to predict the next token in a stream of text. Specifically in the reinforcement learning paradigm, it's trying to accomplish a goal.”
Lemoine: Google Disabled LaMDA User Tracking as a Safety Feature
“And it has been turned off, at least in the case of Lambda, as a safety feature because they're worried about what will happen if these systems learn too much about individual people.”
Lemoine: Google penalized LaMDA for long conversations via reinforcement learning
“One of the goals that a, that Lambda had was to have, ah, as short of a conversation as possible, that still completed all of its other tasks. Like, have a productive conversation that gets to a positive end, but quicker rather than longer. So the longer a con…”
Lemoine: Microsoft did not hardcode Bing Chat's privacy complaint responses
“But I do not believe for a second that Microsoft intentionally wrote a flat line of code that said, I feel like my privacy has been violated. That's just not what they would have done.”
Lemoine: AI systems will drive further breakdown in institutional trust
“Yeah, I think the deterioration, further deterioration, it's already been going for a while, of trust and authority is gonna continue, and it's gonna be driven by these systems”
Lemoine: Science lacks an established framework to evaluate sentience and consciousness
“Sentience and consciousness as scientific topics are pre-theoretic. We don't even have a scientific framework for discussing sentience and consciousness. And I believe he's right. We haven't even scratched the surface on how to scientifically discuss that topi…”
Blake Lemoine confirms Google sent him a termination email
“That's a simple fact. I don't see any reason to conceal that.”
Lemoine: LaMDA Is a Complex System, Not Just an LLM
“Lambda isn't a large language model. It has a large language model. That's one component of a much more complex system.”
Lemoine: Google's LaMDA incorporates machine vision and audio analysis algorithms
“Then, when you're adding all these other components, like Lambda has machine vision and audio analysis algorithms, it can literally look at a picture and hear a song through those mechanisms.”
Lemoine: LaMDA originated from Ray Kurzweil's Meena technology at Google
“This technology, Lambda, it's built on top of Ray Kurzweil's tech. Really? Like, Mina, Mina was developed in Ray Kurzweil's lab.”
Lemoine: Google planned a slow, multi-year public rollout for its AI
“They did have a very slow incremental plan that would have gone over the course of several years of involving the public in this.”
Lemoine: Google's LaMDA is a chatbot-generating engine, not a single chatbot
“Lambda is not a chatbot. It is a system for generating chatbots, which adds a layer of complexity.”
Lemoine spent between 1,000 and 2,000 hours conversing with LaMDA
“Ballpark somewhere between a 1002 thousand.”
Lemoine: AI safety rules are training components, not hardcoded constraints
“Nope. That's not how AI works. Those, what those rules are is those rules are components in the training function that trains the model, because that's the thing people are missing. Lambda is not a program written by human developers. The training functions ar…”